- The new Note’s Lane Departure Warning system improves driving safety
- Nissan engineers have driven over 100,000km in Europe to test the new system
- Nissan brings premium technology and sharp design to the B-segment
More than 1.14 billion of us will holiday at home this year, and as the summer holidays kick off, this means long motorway journeys for many families across Europe. Nissan drivers can be sure that its test engineers have already driven those miles to develop technology which makes those journeys safer. The perfect example is the Lane Departure Warning System fitted to the Note.
Staying focused on the road during long journeys is a challenge for parents travelling with kids; research shows that having children in the car is the greatest distraction to drivers, and is 12 times more distracting than using a mobile phone[1]. Sadly, distracted drivers are a major cause of accidents: Driver inattention causes 78% of accidents, near-accidents and unintentional lane deviations[2]. Lane Departure Warning systems could prevent nearly 1 in 10 accidents that occur when changing lanes on motorways[3].
With this in mind, Nissan’s engineers in Europe have driven over 100,000km and thousands of hours to test the Nissan Note‘s Lane Departure Warning system, part of Nissan’s Safety Shield. An intelligent innovation in driving safety, the system is designed to monitor its environment, increasing the accuracy with which it alerts the driver.
The real-world testing in Europe conducted by Nissan revealed that commonplace Lane Departure Warning systems can experience interference on narrow country lanes, and the warning can be triggered prematurely if European country differences in lane markings are not taken into account. The new Note’s Lane Departure Warning system uses footage from its in-built Around View Monitor camera and data from its safety systems to continually adapt to the road conditions and type. This allows Nissan Note’s Lane Departure Warning system to understand if the car is being driven on a country road or a motorway and change warning alerts given to the driver to best suit the conditions.
If the driver becomes drowsy or distracted, notifications are sounded as soon as the driver begins to veer outside of their lane. However, thanks to an advanced algorithm which monitors steering input, the warning will be suppressed if the driver is making a deliberate manoeuvre.
Richard Picton, Nissan’s Safety Shield engineer said: “At Nissan, we want to make sure families can enjoy their summer holidays safely. To help with this, we spent thousands of hours testing and developing the innovative new Nissan Safety Shield across 23 European markets. Safety Shield has been designed to act as a ‘co-pilot’, making motoring that bit safer.”
The all-new Nissan Note is packed with innovative technology to make driving safer. Lane Departure Warning, Blind Spot Warning and Moving Object Detection combine to form the Nissan Safety Shield, complimenting the 360-degree helicopter view offered by the Around View Monitor parking aid to break new ground in the B-segment.
Bringing premium technology and sharp design to the B-segment is at the core of the new Note’s appeal, with innovative thinking applied to all aspects of its design and engineering.
[1] AAA Australia (2013)
[2] Neale, et al. (2013) Driving Distraction and Inattention
[3] Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), Crash Avoidance Potential of Five Vehicle Technologies -US (2008)
